phantomJS

(Note: I had never played or had an interest in Otome or OELVN before reading this demo. As such, my opinions expressed in this post will reflect accordingly and should be a bias perspective)
Just finished the demo. Great job on the OELVN @milkteebaby!  
Firstly, the writing is pretty good. It is lively, and the demo is interestingly written. It's very novel-ish in style though. Not sure if it's good or bad, but just wanted to point it out.
The soundtrack is pretty good as well and greatly captures or set the mood, especially the scene at the end of the demo.
As for the artwork, it's my first time seeing this type of art and I find it very unique:
                                                                 
Your studio also took real life photos and modified them, and i find the results to be pretty good:
                                        
Overall, I like the artwork and style a lot
 
There are some issues with the demo which I would like to highlight though:
Firstly, there are small grammatical errors in the demo (My average english proficiency has gone down the drain though. Posting this comment for what it's worth ). Also, there are dialogue placement errors too (such as sequence of conversation when the reader first met Naoki in the VN).
The most important thing is this: the VN looks and feels like it takes place in a western country instead of Japan:
                                                                                                
                  \                            
I think it's very difficult to convince readers otherwise unless your side dramatically overhaul the entire VN.
Personally it did not affect me nor my initial good impression of it. Just wanted to highlight this in case it's important to you
 
I think the final product will be great. Try to market it to first time OENVL / Otome readers like myself. This demo certainly made a very good impression on me and I like it a lot
Best of luck with your project!
 
 

Nowhere did I say or imply that MTL is accurate or representative of the actual source material; please do not put words in my mouth or make assumptions. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows that it isn't. My point was simply that if somebody wants to read it, and is happy with the result, then it's perfectly fine. Do you intend to bash me if I want to read a machine translation of  Relaxation Yuka En ~Hitozuma Therapist ni Yoru Sentai~ (NSFW) because I can't fully immerse myself in the accurate source material or understand the deep, philosophical subtext and undertones? 
I personally don't have any intention of learning Japanese, as I do not have an interest in it or the culture of Japan or Japanese products, etc; but neither do I read machine translations, for reference.
Yes, machine translated products are universally crap. I completely agree with you, and I would not want them to held as representative of the genre either. Which is why I specifically said...
 
You seem to be misinterpreting my statements, or otherwise inventing positions I do not hold. There is no way for a MTL to be held as representative of the genre, as you were insisting I supported, if it is purely for personal use and is not disseminated nor used it as a "translation project". I specifically said that MTLs should not be spread to others, and you proceed to lambaste me for encouraging MTL "crap" to be spread and making false claims that it is quality. ???
With all that aside, localisation companies often produce crap and it ends up as representative of the genre regardless. I wouldn't be surprised if an edited MTL ended up better than the professional result of Hoshimeme. 
I have great respect for you, Tymmur, so I will concede to you here as I am sure you are correct. I apologise for my hastiness. 
I don't personally claim I don't have the time to study Japanese. I do, as do most people; I just have no desire to do so.

FYI there are settings in Yomichan which allow you to make the translation appear by just hovering over it, I think the default key is shift (?). 
Also Yomichan is sometimes bad at detecting the word hovered over, making no translation appear, but if you stick to it long enough I have found that just trying to detect it over and over again works (or looking at a word on a website to activate (?) it). 
 
Yeah I wouldn't call it ideal, especially if you have no interest in learning JP grammar or vocab, but it works, especially if you on the other hand know your grammar fairly ok and have some decent vocab, then you can start to see the process speeding up (due to you having to look at the translation less and less). If all you need it for is to look up some one-off word it is particularly good, I've found. 

I don't know about Translation Aggregator, but if you have found it good, it might be the best option out there for those who are just looking to enjoy a VN without perhaps doing the whole learning JP thing. Like you said Chiitrans is outdated (and most likely gone forever, since there doesn't seem to be any signs of it being updated) and VNR a mess. 

Hello again. Today, I have the 7th week of progress updates.
Here are the updates!
Translation:
Prologue - 100% (1791/1791)
Edit
Prologue - 42% (748/1791)
The translation for the prologue is finally finished. That's one huge leap towards the upcoming prologue patch. The team is aiming for it to be released in a couple of months, but that's just a rough estimate. I hope you're all excited by those prospects.
We are always looking for more help in any positions that still need filling. Please PM me if you're interested in filling one of these positions.
That's all the progress I have for this week. We are approaching ever closer to that prologue patch. Get hyped, and I'll see you all next week.

❅ Update Log ❅
6 August 2018 - PV release
14 July 2018 - New demo released
13 July 2018 - Script rechecked
29 April 2018 - Demo Release
❅ DOWNLOAD DEMO FOR WINDOWS, MAC AND LINUX FROM ITCH.IO ❅
❅ KICKSTARTER PAGE ❅

 
❅ Demo Gameplay ❅

❅ Story ❅
The world is full of mysteries and secrets.

In the shadows, beyond what the ordinary people can see, demons, witches and other supernatural beings live and fight. 

But on a night 20 years ago, the balance of this world was offset. Until today, no one knew what truly happened that night. The only sign, one that even normal humans could sense, was the 'Hoshi no Ame': a rain of colorful stars all around the world. Since then, there have been several mysterious occurrences that even supernatural beings could not explain. 

One of these occurrences is the appearance of the Shin. 
The Shin is a mysterious special ability granted to a few human children who were born in the past 20 years. However, this power comes at the cost of great misfortune, bringing danger to to the bearer and those around them. Because of this several tragedies happened.

Now those children, who have survived such a cruel fate, are slowly gathering in one place to finally reveal the truth:

Aurora Academy.

Aurora Academy...
... is a famous school with outstanding results in education and sports, but only in the eyes of normal humans.  
In reality, it's a place designed to protect the children who own a shin.



❅ Main Characters ❅







❅ Side Characters ❅

 
❅ Features ❅
Genres: Fantasy, romance, school life, mystery, comedy, action
Rate: 13+, for violence/blood and suggestive themes
Screensize: 1920x1080
Commercial or free? Commercial.
Platform: PC (Steam), possible iOS and Android
Languages: English (French, German later)
Possible Endings: 14 (2 endings/love interest, 2 for the common route)

The full game will contain:
- High replay value, 70+ hours of gameplay through multiple paths .
- 6 characters to romance, 20+ side characters  
- Partly/fully original soundtrack. Opening and ending video.
- Engaging character sprites with several poses and variations.  
- 30+ locations (with season and daytime variations)
- 95+ CGs, 10+ chibi CGs

 
❅ Progress (Demo) ❅
Writing: 100%
Sprites: 80%
BG: 32%
CG: 72%
GUI: 100%
Music: 100%
Programming: 90%


❅ Project Timeline ❅

Demo Release - 2018 April
(first version, Features: 2+ hours playtime, 15-18 CGs, ~14 BGs)
Op video Release
Kickstarter Campaign



❅ The Team ❅
Project Leader, Writer, Main Artist: Raikon Kitsune
Composer, Proofreader: Solo Acapello
Assistant Artists: Hana Kuro, kamuiji, Piaalit
Vocalist: Lunacy
Programming: Raikon Kitsune, 
dansylverstere, Haseo, Dovahkitteh
Maya: Promotional and Reward Production Assisstant
Engine: Ren'py
Proofreaders: AntiquedFae, Anihime, Venom Wolf
KeiiPie:  Animator


❅ Socials ❅
I'm eager to hear your comments, questions, suggestions, or any feedback! So go ahead and contact me here or on any of these sites 
Website  I Patreon I Discord I Tumblr  I Lemmasoft I Twitter I DeviantArt 
I Instagram I Facebook I Youtube I 
 
❅ Feedback ❅
1. What do you think of the premise of the VN?
2. Which character(s) captured your interest the most?
3. Any rewards or stretch goals that you would like to see in the kickstarter campaign?
4. Any other comments or questions?
 

 

 
Thank you so much for reading and looking forward to your feedback!

What's wrong with that? It's merely an abbreviation, like how I call my pals from Germany Germs.
There's nothing wrong with MTL. Learning Japanese is a time-consuming, arduous task with minuscule payoff and little to no professional or vocational benefits. Not everybody wants to invest so great a portion of their life into learning a language solely for the consumption of visual novels.
There's also nothing wrong with that. As long as nobody attempts to disseminate their MTL or pass it off as a translation project, there is no issue whatsoever. Please take your Japanese fetishism and elitism elsewhere, Kiriririri.

Hi and welcome to Fuwanovel
For information on the processes of fan translations, the replies in this thread will help u a lot:
For any further questions, you can post questions in the forums. Fuwanovel has a lot of experienced people in Fan TL such as @Clephas who is a demi-god in VN related stuff and helped with Dracu-Riot's english translation (a fan group TL, not the official one currently in the works by Sekai Project), and @tymmur who is the head of the Musumaker TL project.
Enjoy your stay here~~

Hello everyone,
I am new to this forum and from Canada. I don't typically use forums, but this one appealed to me because fan translations have always played an integral role in my life and have shaped many of my life decisions. I joined because I want to learn more about how fan translators extract, translate, and repackage text files in visual novels. I also want to know how fan translators organize the translation workflow and which tools they typically employ.
Currently, I speak French and English, but I'm also learning Japanese (at a snail's pace) in my spare time, and I hope to help the community translate visual novels into English once I have reached a high enough level of fluency (I'm legit still a complete n00b at the language).
I hope that I can learn from everyone and help out one way or another.

The heroines aren't your standard tsunderes, they seriously all come off as spiteful people that just want to beat the crap out of you whenever they see your face. You are literally considered a cockroach to them and the only time they show hints of love is when they've beaten the crap out of you and then pretend to be "sorry" but just proceed to add insult to injury later on. I know sometimes the protagonist deserves it, but sometimes they just want excuses to beat you up, it's completely ridiculous and stops being funny after the first 10 times.
I don't know how anyone can lump these girls in the "just tsunderes" category, I legitimately thought this was a VN about bullying when I first read it because that's all the heroines do to the protagonist.
The common route is a hollow shell of nothingness, I don't know why it's there other than introducing the characters and giving you a basic plot to branch off of.
The heroine's routes barely change from the common route because the heroines keep being extremly rude people, way past the "just tsundere" line, they literally come off as hating you at times, not that hate where you can see the love behind it, just pure hate. The game tries to make up for all the shit the heroines have done by throwing them into h-scenes with you where suddenly your japanese chinpo makes them go all sweet and shy (quality writing right here), but I genuinely don't think the pain that comes before that is worth the effort.
Maybe I'm the only person that was amazed at how horrible of a person each heroine in this game really is, but even if I forget about their personalities, all the stories are awful and don't feel connected in the slightest, everything just feels thrown in and makes absolutely no sense in terms of narrative. 
Saying this game is "below average" is being extremly kind, imo.

Constant verbal abuse (quite harsh, sometimes, too) with absolutely no breaks for a few hours. Physical abuse on occasion. And a lot of unfairness for what is essentially a gentleman.

The comments inside that thread will pretty much answer all your questions 

The comments inside that thread will pretty much answer all your questions 

The comments inside that thread will pretty much answer all your questions 

Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate - Don't see this title in recommendation threads enough, so I thought I'll mention it here. Has elements similar to Princess Evangile, especially the romance aspect (which is pretty heavy and serious stuff). Do take note the common route is a bit boring to read through, you cannot go into other routes without finishing Chisato's one first (there are good reasons for this), and her involvement in other routes is heavy and her character is a bit dramatised. Still a very good Rom VN imo.
Princess Evangile W Happiness - For obvious reasons (being the FD of the original P.E)
Noble Works - Rom-Com charage with a setting which is very similar to P.E (Story is about a down on luck MC who gets to attend a prestigious school by chance and what happens there). Storyline is quite funny (especially in Shizuru's route). Good cast of likeable characters too.
 To Heart 2 - Never read before, but could be what you are looking for
 
Rest of the stuff I can think of are repeated very often in the recommendation thread forums:
Clannad - Never played before, but accordingly to people everywhere (including in fuwanovel), a romance nakige with a story almost guaranteed to make you cry
Rewrite - MC is proactive. Common route is well written. Lucia's (one of the main heroine) route is great and pretty romantic. Main things to look out for are the story itself is pretty convoluted and written very long (latter parts of the story answer more questions than it answers), huge wall of text to read through in order to complete/understand the story, romance is not a central part of the VN, and there's a unfinished / open ending (I HATE this part of the VN)
Grisaia no Kajitsu - Common route is interesting, and comedic (but very long). Yuuji (MC) is pretty proactive. I like the heroines a lot, and the routes are deep and well written. One thing I would say about Grisaia is the romance is a bit thin comparatively   
 
The next couple of VNs will probably pop up at some point, but I think you should avoid them:
Kono Oozora ni, Tsubasa o Hirogete - A cult fav. The art is simply gorgeous. I enjoyed the romance in the routes as well. However, the common route is SoL-filled and a bit boring to read though. It is also very heavy on the technical aspect of aviation throughout the entire VN which absolutely bored me to tears. 2 of the routes is a bit mediocre; 1 is quite a bit messily-written, while the 1st of another route is so generic and short, it makes it look like a Yuzusoft side route (I like Nicola's route in Dracu-Riot is better written).
Hatsukoi 1/1 - Slow, draggy, and SoL-filled story which can be insomnia inducing. It's quite over-dramatised too especially in the routes, with 1 route in particular so overly-dramatised that it puts soap operas to shame  
 

I managed to fix it! Leaving the answer here in case someone else struggles. So anyway, in order to get みなとカーニバルＦＤ/Minato Carnival FD to work with ITHVNR you need to use the following:
1. Attach ITHVNR to the game process like usual and start/load the game till you reach the dialogue/narration box
2. then you need this code: "/HSN-10@41de01"
3. Paste it besides the process and hit enter:

MAKE SURE THERE'S NO SPACE BETWEEN THE BORDER OF THE TEXT BOX AND THE CODE (i actually had it paste a couple of times with the space between and of course it failed).
4. After copying it in the appropriate place while the cursor is still in that place hit enter.
5. In the game make the text in the dialogue/narration box run once or twice.
6. come back to ITH and select the appropriate address:

7. Enjoy, i hope this helps!
 
PS: this was tested with Windows 10 Professional Version 1709 OS build 16299.371 (Fall Creators Update), ITHVNR 3.5640.1 (& newer versions) and Minato Carnival FD updated to 1.20, you can grab the update for the novel from here: http://www.minatocarnival.com/support/carnivalfd.html

Who the hell cares. I never aimed to be mistake-free here. Let ittaku be a spelling police / grammar nazi all he wants

So, what are your favorite opening movies in the VNs you've already read or want to read?
As for me, if I had to pick one opening, I'd choose Steins;Gate 0.
It really shows how popular the SG franchise is, because it looks like bigger budget went into this OP's production than some VNs have a a whole. Incidentally, I haven't read S;G0 yet, so I can't say how well it connects to the actual story.
There are a lot more openings I like, including the Minori works or Muv-luv Alternative, but I would also want to mention the second opening movie from Hello, Lady!. It looks pretty spoilerous, so watch on your own risk.
The reason: I wasn't particularly interested in the title before I've seen this opening, but it looks so intriguing so I was immediately sold out, and now it's one of the top untranslated VNs I want to read.

Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate - Don't see this title in recommendation threads enough, so I thought I'll mention it here. Has elements similar to Princess Evangile, especially the romance aspect (which is pretty heavy and serious stuff). Do take note the common route is a bit boring to read through, you cannot go into other routes without finishing Chisato's one first (there are good reasons for this), and her involvement in other routes is heavy and her character is a bit dramatised. Still a very good Rom VN imo.
Princess Evangile W Happiness - For obvious reasons (being the FD of the original P.E)
Noble Works - Rom-Com charage with a setting which is very similar to P.E (Story is about a down on luck MC who gets to attend a prestigious school by chance and what happens there). Storyline is quite funny (especially in Shizuru's route). Good cast of likeable characters too.
 To Heart 2 - Never read before, but could be what you are looking for
 
Rest of the stuff I can think of are repeated very often in the recommendation thread forums:
Clannad - Never played before, but accordingly to people everywhere (including in fuwanovel), a romance nakige with a story almost guaranteed to make you cry
Rewrite - MC is proactive. Common route is well written. Lucia's (one of the main heroine) route is great and pretty romantic. Main things to look out for are the story itself is pretty convoluted and written very long (latter parts of the story answer more questions than it answers), huge wall of text to read through in order to complete/understand the story, romance is not a central part of the VN, and there's a unfinished / open ending (I HATE this part of the VN)
Grisaia no Kajitsu - Common route is interesting, and comedic (but very long). Yuuji (MC) is pretty proactive. I like the heroines a lot, and the routes are deep and well written. One thing I would say about Grisaia is the romance is a bit thin comparatively   
 
The next couple of VNs will probably pop up at some point, but I think you should avoid them:
Kono Oozora ni, Tsubasa o Hirogete - A cult fav. The art is simply gorgeous. I enjoyed the romance in the routes as well. However, the common route is SoL-filled and a bit boring to read though. It is also very heavy on the technical aspect of aviation throughout the entire VN which absolutely bored me to tears. 2 of the routes is a bit mediocre; 1 is quite a bit messily-written, while the 1st of another route is so generic and short, it makes it look like a Yuzusoft side route (I like Nicola's route in Dracu-Riot is better written).
Hatsukoi 1/1 - Slow, draggy, and SoL-filled story which can be insomnia inducing. It's quite over-dramatised too especially in the routes, with 1 route in particular so overly-dramatised that it puts soap operas to shame  
 

The Western VN fandom has long idolised the Japanese VN market. Before the recent growth of the EVN scene and official localisations, Western VN fans had to subsist only on the occasional fan-translations of Japanese VNs while being told how much better the untranslated VNs were. However this faith in untranslated VNs rested on an unspoken assumption: that Western and Japanese VN fans enjoy the same content. But is it true? Through comparing the largest VN fandom site in Japan (erogamescape) against the largest VN fandom site in the West (VNDB), we sought to find out.
Do we love the same VNs?
While the ability of a numerical rating to summarise a subjective experience (like reading a VN) is debatable, the average score a community assigns a VN provides a useful approximation of how highly esteemed that VN is within the community. Both EGS and VNDB allow users to rate VNs they’ve read, so comparing how the same VN scores on both sites gives us an impression of how much the communities agree on which VNs are best.
 


We can see there’s a strong correlation between the score a VN gets on each site, especially for higher rated VNs, showing that both communities tend to agree on which VNs are considered “the best” (despite the ferocious arguments within each fandom over that same question). But as the score drops, so does the agreement over the VN score. So while both communities tend to agree on what’s good, we disagree on what’s bad.
There’s also another trend that’s a little less noticeable, but becomes more apparent if we remove the untranslated VNs...
 


While the untranslated VNs in the last graph seemed to fairly evenly straddle the equal score line, the translated VNs are frequently below it (meaning these VNs score higher on EGS than VNDB). But is the translation a cause or an effect of the lower score on VNDB (i.e. does the release of a translation lower the score on VNDB, or are only low-scoring VNs being translated)? To answer this, we tracked how the VNDB score of a VN changes immediately after a translation is released.
 


We tracked 117 of the most popular Japanese VNs that had an English translation released in the past 5 years. In the first 60 days after their translation was released, their score dropped an average of 0.146 on VNDB, with Fata Morgana being the blip on the far right that significantly bucked the trend and increased in score. There also seems to be slight correlation with lower-rated VNs on EGS dropping more than higher-rated ones.
So it seems confirmed that the translations are the cause rather than an effect. But why does this happen? This remains the subject of fierce debate among my friends, but we came up with a few theories:
Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. Japanese VNs are made for Japanese tastes, so Western fans might not enjoy them to the same extent. Western fans who learn Japanese and use VNDB might align more with the taste of Japanese fans rather than with their fellow Western fans. The high barrier of entry for a Westerner to read an untranslated VN (they have to know Japanese) filters out those who have only a casual interest in the VN. So the pre-translation score is dominated by hard-core fans who are more likely to rate it higher.
The experience of reading a translation can be inferior to reading prose in its original language, so VNDB users rating a VN based on that translation might assign lower scores than those reading the original text.
The larger drop in score for lower-rated VNs might be because they don’t attract the same care and attention by their translators, with any official localisation likely done on a lower-budget.
VN popularity
It isn’t just through scores that we can measure a communities’ tastes, we can also estimate a VN’s popularity through the number of votes it gets. In comparing the number of votes the same VN gets on EGS and VNDB, we can see whether the same VNs are popular in both Japan and the West.
 

Note that this chart is using a log scale.

The most obvious trend is the clear split between translated and untranslated VNs. Unsurprisingly, translated VNs and EVNs do significantly better on VNDB than untranslated VNs. But we Western fans aren’t especially choosey, even fairly unpopular VNs on EGS can attract large fanbases on VNDB if they’re translated.
Given that translations aren’t random, they require either dedicated fan-translators or a localiser willing to invest in them, it’s surprising that the translated VNs span the entire width of popularity on EGS. So we might have expected it to skew more to the right, with unpopular EGS VNs being much less likely to get a translation. While the ratio of translated-untranslated VNs is higher for more popular EGS VNs, no VN seems to be beyond the prospect of being translated, no matter how unpopular it is.
Overall, while there remains a correlation in popularity between EGS and VNDB, it’s far weaker than the score correlation. This mismatch might partially be down to the age of the communities. VNs have been a popular niche of the Japanese market for decades, but were virtually unknown in the West before the 2010s. So there’s quite a number of 80s-00s era JVNs that have hundreds of votes on EGS, but are practically unheard of on VNDB.
Differences in taste
So far we’ve been looking at each VN as a whole, but can we delve deeper? A VN can be seen as a package of tropes: childhood-friend heroine, tsundere heroine, dumb male protagonist that’s inexplicably beloved by all (these 3 criteria should narrow us down to approximately 90% of all VNs ever made /s). Through comparing the scores of VNs that have a trope against those who don’t, we can get an impression of how popular that trope is.
Fortunately we don’t have to determine these tropes ourselves, both EGS and VNDB allow users to apply tags to a VN which denote the type of content it has. So let’s start simple and see which tags are correlated with a higher average score on EGS.
This world cloud ranks the EGS tags by the average score of the VNs they appear in, with higher scores being placed higher on the chart, so we can see what type of content is most lauded on EGS. The text size is proportional to the number of VNs that tag appears in, so we can see what’s a common trope and what’s rare.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.  Note that this is mostly using google translate for the EGS tags, so the labels are… imaginative.

Generally, it seems like complex VNs (with tags such as “intelligent,” “to solve a mystery” and “difficult to get”) are the most highly rated, while more sexual oriented tags seem to be linked with lower average scores (which is probably due to nukige/porn VNs). It also seems Japanese fans value the *novel* over the *visual* element in their VNs, with “CG is beautiful” being rated quite poorly. Towards the bottom are tags mostly related to being old or low-budget (with tags such as “Low price” and “XP supported”).
This has only shown us what Japanese fans like, but we’re more focused on how Japanese and Western fans compare. So instead, let’s try comparing which VNDB tags are correlated with a VN scoring higher on VNDB or EGS.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.

It seems like Western fans value romance and slice of life type stories more than Japanese fans do, whereas Japanese fans are more generous with their nukige/porn ratings. Perhaps we’re more judgemental in our view of sexual content here in the West? Japanese settings also seem to be more favoured among the Western fandom than the Japanese, the weeabooism is real /s. Slightly disappointing is how poorly female protagonists do in the Western fandom. While otomes are widespread in the EVN market, they remain a relatively unpopular niche on VNDB.
Differences in the marketplace
We’ve compared the taste between the Japanese and Western fandoms, but we haven’t looked at the differing availability of VNs in the markets. Are certain types of content more likely to be translated than others? How does the the home-grown Western VN industry differ from the Japanese one?
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version is available here.

It seems that action/violent type content -whether in the form of police investigations or wars- are especially popular subjects for translated VNs. Female protagonists are also surprisingly high, especially since otomes don’t seem to be translated that often, but that might be because an even smaller proportion of nukige/porn type VNs are translated, and they overwhelmingly have male protagonists.
Lastly, let’s look at the EVNs. With a negligible presence in Japan (there were only 4 EVNs on EGS with at least 4 votes), we can’t really compare what the fans prefer, but we can see how the markets differ in the kind of content they produce. This next chart tracks which VNDB tags are more common in EVNs vs JVNs.
 

A full size version of this image is available here, and a spreadsheet version that includes more tags is available here. The sexual content tags were removed because there’s so little sexual content in EVNs that it seemed a waste of space, and it gave room to include rarer content type tags.

The clearest difference between the markets is in the amount of porn, there’s exceedingly little in EVNs. This is likely due to the smaller budget for EVNs which would preclude h-scene artwork, and restrictions on adult content on Steam discouraging such content.
EVNs encompass a broader range of protagonists than JVNs with LGBTQ+ related content being much more common, and female protagonists being as common as males (unlike JVNs where female protagonists make up only a small proportion of VNs). But JVNs can be inclusive in other ways, like being the sole representation of protagonists who can turn into panties.
Stories relating to personal difficulties, especially regarding depression, seem much more common in EVNs too. They also seem more willing to break from the usual high-school settings of JVNs, having more university aged and above characters.
Criticisms
Before we get carried away with forming any stereotypes of Japanese and Western fanbases from this data, let’s consider a few issues with the data.
The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. The VNDB and EGS userbase might not be representative of the wider Western/Japanese fandom. As per some of our earlier analysis posts, VNDB significantly undercounts the popularity of EVNs for example. So some caution should be taken in extrapolating what the wider fanbase likes based on this data. It’s easy to mix up cause and effect. Are sci-fi stories better than other stories and that’s why they’re associated with higher scores? Or is it that VNs that care about their story are just more likely to have a sci-fi setting?
Some trends, like what type of content is more likely to be translated, might just be tracking the changing tastes of the era. With older VNs being less likely to be translated than newer VNs, the charts might just be picking up on what kind of content has become more popular in recent years.
The dataset has some errors. EGS and VNDB catalogue VNs differently and that can cause some mismatches in the data. We’ve done our best to account for that, but with the dataset being so large, some mistakes will have slipped through.
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to /u/8cccc9, Part-Time Storier, and Cibelle for helping with this analysis.
I hope you enjoyed reading through this, and if so, you should check out my tumblr and twitter for more VN analysis posts. If you have any feedback, questions, or suggestions for further analyses then you can reply here, on twitter, or DM me on Discord (Sunleaf_Willow ／(^ n ^=)＼#1616).
Our next analysis post is likely to be on h-scenes. What type of content is most highly regarded by the fandom? How has the popularity in the fandom of certain sexual acts risen erect and fallen limp over time? How is the EVN market handling sexual content in contrast to Japan? Hopefully we’ll have lots of answers (and some painful puns) next time~

Felt like reviving this thread as the last post is on July 2017 and there had been quite a lot of new VNs released since then. Fuwanovel-ers should have new fav OP to recommend
1 of the VNs I'm reading/playing now is Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate. I think the OP is pretty catchy:
 

Well, here a few standouts in my eyes at least.
Starting with the obvious
I really loved the opening of Aoishiro as well.
Got to represent my favorite vn

Felt like reviving this thread as the last post is on July 2017 and there had been quite a lot of new VNs released since then. Fuwanovel-ers should have new fav OP to recommend
1 of the VNs I'm reading/playing now is Koi to Senkyo to Chocolate. I think the OP is pretty catchy:
 

MMM: Murder Most Misfortunate
Saw a creator of that VN post on reddit on his team's experiences making the VN and after it went on sales. Thought I'll post it here as my purpose of creating this create is to give people ideas on the business side of making Visual Novels:
 

his vn taste are very limited to stuff no one wants to read or just nukiges.  

You intend to recommend Chrono Clock to anyone and everyone out there from now on? (Damm you pipped my curiosity on just exactly how good it is . Gonna read in for sure in the nearby future~~)
Also, no mention of Grisaia no Kajitsu so far? The common route is pretty comedic (although the routes are pretty dark in tone).
For an unconventional recommendation, you can try Cross Channel: Moenovel's Steam(ing pile of poo) edition. Personally, I find that the TL is so (laughablely) bad, that it's good